End of VCB – VMware Consolidated Backup

In the upcoming release of vSphere there will be no more VCB.

As some bloggers already announced, VCB backup will be phased out and replaced by VDR. At the moment when you download vSphere, you still have a choice between VCB and VDR. So in vSphere 4.1 (if this is the future release number… 8-)),  this will no longer be the case. The only backup product will be the VDR.

Of course there are 3rd party backup products like VEEAM, Vizioncore, Symantec … with much more functionalities, but will VMware want to enhance VDR to try to reach the level of features those products have? Or VDR will stay SMB product only….

As I mentioned in my yesterday's post, the end of support for existing customers for VCB is in July 2010. As pointed Rich Brambley on the comment section of the post,

Customers just need to update to VC 2.5 U6 and ESX/ESXi 3.5 U5 by May.

So you still be able to use this product, but there will be no future enhancements or updates made available, and with vSpehre 4.1 the VCB will not be proposed as a download any more. Here is an extract from vMware Letter sent to it's curent customers.

Starting with the next vSphere platform feature release, VCB will be removed from vSphere platform. VADP integrated backup products (including VMware Data Recovery) will be the recommended option for efficient backup and restoration of vSphere Virtual Machines.

VMware will focus on future enhancements of VDR, and it's a good thing, because the product has some limits. To point some of them:

–  No FLR of individual files of non windows guests.
–  Hard limit of 100 VMs (you can't have more than 100 VMs on your list to backup).
–  limited to 1Tb of data per dedup store and max. is 2 stores. Deduplication store is to store your backups actually.
–  VDRis not compatible with vCenter Server 4 Linked Mode

Those limits are not that penalizing for SMB's but for how long? Now even SMB's need more storage, and also more place for backup….

VDR – VMware Data Recovery is a base product for SMB's which can leverage the CBT functionality. CBT – a Changed Block Tracking feature track the blocks being changed since last backup and those blocks are backed up. This speeds up a backup process. No need to do a full backup of your VMs every day.

If you want to see how to restore individual files which had been accidentaly deleted from withint your VM, just folow this step-by-step article.

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